Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: In The Wild with Ted Hughes

by Ehor Boyanowsky

Overview

They met at a poetry reading, but Ehor Boyanowsky and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes became friends through their shared — and unquenchable — passion for fishing. Against the backdrop of the Dean River, one of the greatest steelhead rivers in the world, the two men explored their mutual regard for the planet's wild places. Boyanowsky draws on personal correspondence, interviews, and journal entries to recreate their encounters in the 1980s and '90s, when Hughes was at the height of his power and influence, and to paint an intimate portrait of a lifelong outdoorsman, conservationist, and artist. The book also goes behind the creative process as fishing logs transmute into poetry, talk becomes action, and the queen's bard composes impromptu bawdy verse on the drive to a stag party. Boyanowsky realizes he's been privileged to see a Hughes who is different from the public persona. In these tales of male friendship and the primal act of fly fishing, the reader gets glimpses of the "nature red in tooth and claw" that drew Ted Hughes to Canada — and rekindled his love of the natural world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926706917
Publisher:	Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Publication date:	03/23/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ehor Boyanowsky is a criminal psychologist and professor at Simon Fraser University. An avid fisherman who has written extensively on fishing and conservation issues in Rod and Reel and other magazines, he lives in Horseshoe Bay, British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Prologue
The Westminster Abbey service for Ted Hughes reawakens a decade's worth of memories

Chapter One
Hughes had read my letter, in fact had read my poems, not only read them but claimed to like them. And it appears he wants to fish together. Against all odds there is a lovely gentleness about him. Odds are he is a nice guy, the literary scuttlebutt notwithstanding.

Chapter Two: Tales Of Dean River Steelhead
We decide to have Ted record the week's adventures in the Totem Camp Logbook: a task the newest member of the group is usually asked to undertake. As it turns out it affords us an opportunity not only to read his prose, but to observe how he eventually turns it into a long narrative poem. One that he entitles The Bear, his second composition by that name.

Chapter Three: The Thompson River And The Artist
A wistful look enters Ted's eyes and he wonders out loud whether this was the place he dreamed about with his brother Gerald when they were boys: a land of cowboys and Indians and giant salmon. They made a pledge to emigrate but Gerald went to Australia, Ted got no farther than Devon.

Chapter Four: The Halcyon Days
The world feels, looks and smells very fecund and healthy today: a portent we hope. Our need to wet a line, notwithstanding, we pause to drink in the richness of the scene. "Being here adds years to one's life", Ted says softly, "remind me of that if I ever get too caught up in the morass of my overcommitted life sentence."

Chapter 5: A House Divided
Ghost tales, bawdy verse, and a love story balance a time of betrayal and environmental danger.

Chapter Six: Hebrides And Devon
Meeting the poet on his home turf. Alongside river fishing in Scotland and England, Hughes opens the door on his Devon home, and his writing shack: "You must find a similar place away from the phone and family and friends. Otherwise, the tendrils reach out and drag you away. And suddenly you are old and no project is important anymore."

Chapter Seven: The BC Summer of 1993
Black-tie dinners notwithstanding, it's a simple meal of crabs pulled from the Pacific, boiled in a beachside kettle, and served with wine and a priceless view that sticks. "We are reliving a 10,000-year ceremony tonight," Ted says. It reminds you that the world is worth fighting for.

Chapter Eight: Russia, Devon And The Dean
The final trip to the Dean finds the poet in a reflective state of mind. "If I were deprived of fishing, of that kind of live, intimate, interactive existence - it would be as though I had some great, vital part of me amputated. It gives you some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self."